User talk:Peter Z./Notes on the former Yugoslavia

The former Balkan State Yugoslavia is indeed a complex affair. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall evidence has emerged that portrays this country in totally different light.

The region has had a truly tragic history since the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918.

• Parliamentary assassination of Stjepan Radic in Belgrade (1928)
• The Jasenovac concentration camp of World War Two
• Way of the Cross, Bleiburg and Foibe massacres (1945/46)
• Srebrenica massacre of the early 1990s during the Bosnia War (1992–1995)

Dictatorships:

• King Alexander I
• Josip Broz Tito

Korcula was part of Dalmatia

In 1918 Korčula (then called Curzola) was part of Dalmatia, a province in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was already more than a century old (Dalmatia itself as a region, dates back to the Roman Empire). According to the Austrian censuses it was predominately made up of Croatians and Italians (and other minorities). With the disintegration of Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Serbia started occupying the region (Italy did the same). This was interpreted back then as the formation of the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia & Slovenia. The new kingdom had the support of Great Britain and France, who were the superpowers of the day. In retrospect this was a tragic move, one that the United States was against. The effects of this political stupidity are still felt today. It is interesting how this newly created state “Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia & Slovenia”, which latter became better know as the ill fated Yugoslavia, was given so much support over the succeeding decades. This part of European history surely needs more academic attention.

Concerns

A large proportion of information (books,articles) concerning the former Yugoslavia reminded me of the Yugoslavian encyclopaedias of the 1970s. The encyclopaedias were written in the same style as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

• William Benton, (publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica), stated that: "about the second edition of the encyclopedia that the encyclopedia had a political bias and claimed that its purpose was a propaganda weapon". The Yugoslavian encyclopaedias were also used as a propaganda weapon to show the superiority of Titoism and the Socialist Yugoslavia to other societies and political systems.

Additionally Slavicization of non Slavic regions in Yugoslavia was continued as government policy under the Communist Party of Yugoslavia after World War Two. The regime removed ethnic populations (Germans, Italians & Hungarians). This information can be sourced from reliable scholars.

Information was and still is being presented to the world, an historical perspective of former communist Yugoslavia that was written by a Totalitarian political system.

• Joachim Friedrich & Zbigniew Brzezinski on Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy:

Characteristics of a totalitarian regime; a total ideology, a single mass party, a terrorist secret police, a monopoly of mass communication, all instruments to wage combat are in the control of the same hands, and a centrally directed planned economy. Totalitarian dictatorships emerge after the seizure of power by the leaders of a movement who have developed support for an ideology. The point when the government becomes totalitarian is when the leadership uses open and legal violence to maintain its control. The dictator demands unanimous devotion from the people and often uses a real or imaginary enemy to create a threat so the people rally around him.

• Reports and proceedings of the 8th of April European public hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes”, organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (January–June 2008) and the European Commission, stated the following: Totalitarian machines

Let us mention briefly Fascism, National Socialism and Titoism in Italy, Austria and Slovenia (a former republic of Yugoslavia). Three Christian nations, with nationalist tendencies, were infected with totalitarianism. The descent into barbarism has comparable structural elements:

• Abuse of national sentiment to carry out racial and class revolutionary projects;
• Cult of a great leader, who permits his fanatics to murder, steal and lie;
• Dictatorship of one party;
• Militarisation of society, police state – almighty secret political police;
• Collectivism, subjection of the citizen to the totalitarian state;
• State terrorism with systematic abuses of basic human rights;
• Aggressive assumption of power and struggle for territory. (page 197.)

Now thanks to the Internet, this pseudo historical perspective that once was only know to Tito's Yugoslavia, has gone World Wide. This is truly disturbing because the former communist Yugoslavia encompassed peoples descendant of the Roman Empire, Republic of Venice, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and so and so forth.

Peter Z. 07:59, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Media links

• Press Agency: Columnist Says Silence on Post-War Killings Needs to End (Interview). Ljubljana, 1 April (STA) - Alenka Puhar, an author who has written extensively about Slovenia's Communist past (a former republic of Yugoslavia), has told STA in an interview that post-WWII killings need to be examined and discussed. "We need to talk about it and live with it, with this pain," she said.
• EurActiv Network Croatian PM pays tribute to controversial war victims (Croatia a former republic of Yugoslavia).